WAEC sacks 2 employees over 2015 BECE leakage

The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has dismissed two employees who were said to have breached security regulations resulting in the leaks of five papers during the 2015 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).

A third staff who was to supervise the affected staff has however, been demoted because of poor supervision. The Head of National Office of WAEC, Very Rev. Samuel Nii Nmai Ollennu, made this known to Graphic Online.

He, however, did not put out the names of the affected staff that have been sanctioned. “Alongside the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) investigations, WAEC also set up its own investigative committee to look into the matter and identify places where security was breached and the culprits involved.

The WAEC committee completed its work and from their findings three officers were found to have gone against some of the critical security regulations.

“Out of this three, two of them have been dismissed for breach of the security regulations and one has been demoted,” he said. WAEC cancelled five subject papers in last year’s BECE. They were English Language 2; Religious and Moral Education; Integrated Science; Mathematics, and Social Studies.

The cancellation followed the discovery by the council that those papers had leaked and, thereby, the integrity of the papers had been compromised. The Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) also waded into the matter to bring the culprits to book.

The leaked papers were subsequently re-taken on June 29 and 30, 2015. A total of 438,030 candidates, made up of 229,724 males and 208,306 females, took part in the examination.

About 13,434 basic schools, both public and private, took part in the examination which was written at 1,546 centres across the country. Very Rev. Ollennu said the council was not saying the two dismissed staff were those who leaked the papers but did not follow security regulations and that “the only organisation that can say so is the BNI, because they have the capacity to investigate the incident to the core”.

The BNI, he said, has since sent the two dismissed staff to court. The two dismissed staff, he said, did not challenge the committee’s findings because the evidence was overwhelming, and that “in fact, they admitted that they had breached the security regulations and it is based on that we applied the sanctions”. Very Rev. Ollennu said the BECE leaks occurred in Accra.

The recommendations, he said, of the WAEC investigative committee were used to rearrange the council’s security set up to ensure that what happened last year would not happen again.